Zach and Leslie

Happy New Year everyone! Just got back last week from my Christmas vacation in Disney World! The best part about the trip was my best friend Zach Baker getting married to his wife Leslie. Here's a wedding present I cooked up for the two of them. Hopefully it's just the right amount of lovey-dovey. 

An old man and his sweater-vest...

Had the urge to draw old people recently. For a quick drawing, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.

Stegall Family Portrait

Howdy Folks! Over the past couple weeks, I've been working on this fun little side project for Jeremy Stegall, a friendly chap I met while tabling at Baltimore Comic Con. He commissioned me to do a "family portrait" for him and his wife. I really enjoyed getting to create an image that captured the personality of the Stegall clan, instead of a more traditional painted portrait. Any who, hope you guys enjoy the piece! I'm particularly fond of the dogs.

Also, you should check out Jeremy's photography portfolio. He's based in Laramie, WY. Got some impressive stuff on his website!

I saw a bear in the den...

The lyrics in Owl City's music, although highly eccentric, is very poetic and surprising descriptive. This illustration is based off of a line from his song Plant Life.

Olive

This is my latest addition to my personal Pushing Daisies fan art collection. Olive has some of the best lines and character moments on the show. I think my love for Pushing Daisies might be reaching an unhealthy level of obsession, mostly because I continue to drool over the production design. Oh well! I’m sure that infatuation will run its course, but for now, you folks will just have to put up with it. A shame, I know. 

The Dark Knight Returns

Pencil and Inks: Drew Zucker

Color: Matt Doering

I had the pleasure recently of working on my first collaborative art piece with my buddy Drew Zucker, a fellow SCAD grad and rising sequential artist. This is our entry for the Dark Knight Returns tribute/competition sponsored by the 2011 New York Comic Con. Selected artists get their piece published in an anthology. I’m so glad Drew asked me to color this piece! He sure did a spectacular job making Batman look epic as hell. Needless to say, it was a fun piece to color, and refreshing to dive back into the comic world for a change. Wish us luck, and take some time to show Drew’s blog some lovin! 

Pushing Daisies

I’ve been on a “Pushing Daisies” fan art kick recently (mostly because it gives me an excuse to look up production stills from the show). Such a whimsical and gorgeous show! 

I love watching TV via Netflix while I draw. It’s the perfect time for me to catch up on shows that people have recommended to me, and unlike my iPod playlist, it never gets boring. I just finished the first season of 24 last night. What are you folks currently watching? Anything suggestions I should add to the queue?


Update:
I've received some great TV show suggestions as a result of this post:
1) The Wire
2) Sherlock (BBC)
3) Battlestar Galactica (the new version)

...And More Bird Characters

...and more birds, more silhouettes. Okay maybe I’m taking the whole silhouette thing a little too far, but I will admit, this process was tremendously helpful for setting up a multiple character scene. This story I'm working on is about a fan boy desperately trying to get noticed by his favorite flamenco dancing duo. 

Christmas Card

Whew! what a whirlwind of a two weeks it's been since my last post. We're getting really close at work to finishing our latest Facebook game. It's been several late night getting prepped for our Beta presentation to our clients this week. Luckily I've managed to get my ducks in a row for Christmas (not sure how that happened). Shopping is done and I just finished illustrating my Christmas card. Hope you guys like it! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of my fellow bloggers.

Slow day in paradise

I bet St. Peter likes to knit angel wings in his spare time. I'm sure even heaven has it's slow days :D

Happy (belated) Halloween!

Better late than never :)

Last week was TOTALLY RAD! This is the first Halloween that I’ve been able to hard-core celebrate in a long time. Thank you New York for making this season very hard core in deed. Seriously, there was a new Halloween related activity I got to participate in each day last week:

Last Sunday: Paranormal Activity

Monday: Shopping for my Halloween costume - Todd Ingram

Tuesday: Horror Film Director Lecture Series (this one included the director of C.H.U.D.)

Wednesday: Paranormal Activity 2 (scared the shit out of me).

Thursday: Pumpkin carving and the Spanish horror film REC

Friday: Office shindig. candy, and lighting the pumpkins

Saturday: Halloween party in Brooklyn (we were out till 3:00 dancing and bar hoping (one of the bars had Nightmare Before Christmas on loop)).

Sunday: Resting more Halloween movies (Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, Secret Window, Disturbia). And of course, there was more candy to be had :)

Hope everyone enjoyed their week too!

Fat Unicorns RULE!

So, over the course of my college years, I’ve promised a few friends that I would create some artwork for them. Last December (yeah I know, a LONG time ago), I promised my friends Cora and Jane, that I would do a painting of them as vikings riding the back of a fat unicorn (kind of a homage to that classic Bugs and Elmer cartoon). AND HERE IT IS!!! And it turned out pretty ridiculous what with the volcanes AND the lightning. Ha! It was fun. Taught myself some new coloring tricks in Photoshop along the way. Now onto even CRAZIER pieces!!! Any suggestions? Anyone?

Comic-Con Post: Part 1

I'd like to say that this image really represent my Comic Con experience as a whole (insert clever metaphor about the small yet mighty claiming victory despite the vast insurmountable challenges) but it really doesn't. I don't know where this image came from. I'm not even sure it's all that interesting. Looks like you guys will just have to continue to bear with me while I try to come up with imagery that actually has good visual storytelling. 

I'll post more about the Con in my next post, but for right now the main challenge with the image was to come up with something quick. Hopefully overtime, as I practice more, I'll start coming up with better story ideas and compositions. I want to start treating my blog like Pascal Campion where I post a new drawing, sketch, or illustration everyday. But until things start to settle down here in NYC I'm not sure I can stick with a daily commitment just yet. We'll see!

A new direction for my blog...

Update: I added some texture to this image, and I really love how it turned out. Yep, I think I'll be starting this new film series in a few weeks, after comic con, and after I move into my new apartment. Details coming soon.

I mentioned in my last post that I wanted to get better at drawing sexy women (because for some reason I didn't practice enough in college). I've been revisiting classic films and found that several artistic principles found in good visual design for animation are also heavily prevalent in live action film as well, just in a more subtle fashion. So I stumbled across the Havana scene from the movie "Guys and Dolls and boy, that scene is filled with great silhouettes, dynamic contrasts, straights vs curves, a whole slew of great compositional principles. It was really inspiring. I based the above illustration off of a screen shot I took from the scene.  

I've been looking for a subject or prompt that I could use for posting regular illustrations and I think this might be what I'm looking for. So, here's the idea. Every week I'll choose a shot, pose, or interesting composition from a live action film, analyze it, and create an illustration based on my findings. What do you guys think? I think there's a lot of learning potential in this project. After studying animation for four years, it might be good to take a break and see what inspiration I can draw from live action.

Also here's the scene from youtube. Enjoy! 

I missed it by two minutes!!!

For those of you who haven't checked out Sketchoholic get yur little hiny over there pronto and sign up! So much fun! Its a great website chock full of artistic resources, competitions, and artist interviews. I found out about this website via the wonderful Chrystin Garland and  Zane Yarbrough. It's crazy! Just in the past week, two wonderful interviews from Nate Wragg and Everett Downing (Pixar Artist and Pixar Animator respectively) about their experiences in the animation industry. You think there are enough links in this paragraph?

Tonight Nate Wragg held a competition titled "Wall Street Cyclops." Here's is my late submission for the competition because tonight was also a major deadline for a project at work, for which my team and I have been working our tails off the past two weeks to complete. Actually I did get the drawing done with a minute to spare, but forgot to create an account. *snaps finger*

For this drawing I took inspiration from the show Mad Men. I've been wanting an excuse to practice drawing sexy women and this seemed to be a good opportunity! Still some things I want to tweak and color will come eventually. Thoughts?

So I'm a little behind on my holidays...

Yup, this is my father's day post...on Independence Day. Haha! I'll catch sooner or later. This drawing goes out to my awesome Dad, celebrating all the crap he's put up with over the years. Thanks Dad! Your seemingly endless flow of patience is inspiring.

I just finished my first month on the job at Large Animal Games, and so far it's been a highly exciting yet, somewhat exhausting experience so far. Working a full time art job is a little bit more difficult that I expected, but with any new experiences, it takes a little bit of time to adjust. Finding time for my personal artwork has been tough, but getting better (which is why posting hasn't been so frequent...ahem). We just finished a prototype for a new facebook game this week. I helped with concept design, layout and animation artwork for the game, so fingers crossed that it gets approved for production! 

Life in New York is busy and exhilarating! Happy 4th of July everyone! I'll have an independence day type of something or other posted soon :P

More Fun with Caricatures

This here's one of the judges from Law and Order: SVU. What a face indeed (and what a drab and useless character on the show too). But he certainly is fun to draw!

More "Pet Yeti" Backgrounds...

Finals are a week from tomorrow. I'm going to get all of my stuff done...how?

BUT, good news! My compositor Nate Taylor and I sat down last night to work on the film and we now have one mintue of COMPLETELY finished film!!! Only three more to go! New project deadline has this film finishing up right around the end of July. Just in time for San Diego Comic Con!

Finally!

Ok folks, I finally finished the last of the eight illustration series for the "Emma and Molly's Pet Yeti" opening sequence. Whew! Boy did these turn out to me more troublesome than I originally anticipated. Ugh! My next post will be all eight of them in a row so you can see the story progression from one to the other. I swear I think whatever my next film is, I think it will be one of those cool painted short films that keep cropping up all over Cartoon Brew and Line Boil. The majority of the work that I've done for EMPY has been painting, and I'm really starting to enjoy painting and illustrating a lot. Many of the artist that crop up on these sites have found really unique ways to combine painting, illustrating, and animation into one perfect hybrid. It's cool to think that animation doesn't necessarily have to be separated into animation, cleanup, background painting, but that all three processes can be one in the same. I'm even more excited for graduation now. I can't wait to explore and experiment!

Here are a few of my more recent favorite short films that you guys should totally check out. All of these have been a huge influence for my next film (again, whatever that might be (not sure yet)). 

Headless Studio Reel

Bear Film

Red

Valencia California

Happy Mother's Day!

Well, I'll admit. This is an image for the film BUT it is oddly appropriate considering the holiday don't you think?

We're getting down to the wire here at school with finals (and graduation)only three weeks away, but boy is time escaping me quickly. "Emma and Molly's Pet Yeti" is making steady progress. The portion of the film that we're going to put in the senior showcase is almost complete! All that's left is cleanup, color, and a few more backgrounds. Here's a composite test that I just recently uploaded to vimeo. Unfortunately I won't be able to load the whole film onto the internet until the festival circuit is complete but I'll continue to delight you all with a wide variety of "sneak peaks" until then (like I've been doing :D) Enjoy!